Transcript for July 27 Town Hall for Fall 2022 Incoming Class

Speaker: CBS Dean Mazyar Fallah

Thank you all for attending, I'm going to talk today about our 2022 incoming class. Really cover over a couple of things, primarily the incoming class information, including on how we got here. And then the resources and planning that have gone in as a result of the size of our incoming class. I can't really see anybody on the screen, so feel free to put questions in the chat, or hold your questions and put your hand up. I'll go over them at the end. I did receive a couple of questions by email in advance and I'll cover those as well.

So, I want to start off with the provincial overview. Where are we? Why do we have so many students? And how do we compare to the other major universities within the province? And basically, I've looked at any province that has around 5000 or more, sorry, any university in the province that has 5000 or more students. And so, what you can see here is that we had a strong change in the number of students between 21 and 22. Going up by was actually 49.8%, around 50%. Province-wide things only increased 3%. So, we have a huge increase that wasn't really seen across the province. Though, I will say, in sheer numbers UOttawa was actually very close to us. So, they had about 1500 additional students. Though they have a much larger student body to begin with, than we do. And we had 2100 extra students. But for the most part, these numbers went down. Some of these numbers going down for other universities is because they had extra high enrolments last year. So, if anybody recalls from last year, we didn't have a town hall on it because it wasn't so bad for us in CBS. But as the province as a whole saw increases in many universities, and U of G was one of the universities that took a hit with reduced enrolments. But within CBS, we were actually still on target. By the time September hit. We were we were exactly. We were on target for the BSc and about 99 students over what was what our targets were for CBS specific programs. So, we have a big bump, other than UOttawa others don't, and why? And that's probably a big question on many people's minds, there isn't a 100% agreed upon answer. But what I'm going to say is the timing matters. And where I'm going with that is normally in the recruitment cycle we send out about... offers to get the first 10% of our class in the first round of offers.

So maybe I'll back up, if you're not aware of how this works, the university sends out offers in bunches and we call them rounds. And within a round, we have sweeps. So, we might actually send out bunches of offers two or three times and call them first, second and third sweep in a given round. The rounds are based on timing. So, the first round happens when we only have their grade 11 grades, then we do a second round when the grade 12 grades for the fall term start coming in. And then we do a third round which is near the end of the recruitment cycle as we're approaching that deadline of the beginning of June where everybody needs to make their decisions. So in the past, we've done about 10% of our targets coming in the first round, we'd go up to you know, try to get another 50% or so by the end of the third sweep in the second round. So, we're looking at the end of March, early April to get to that 60% total. And then we did the last 40% in the third round, which those are the offers that are going out in mid to late April and all through May before that final deadline of say June 2nd or June 4th. The problem with this is that when you take a look at things like the U of G reddit, there are students who are really good students who want to come to our programs we’re their first choice, but they will get offers much sooner from other universities, our competitors, and they get tired of waiting for us. And so, they'll be sitting here saying, you know, we want to do for example, Zoology here, instead of Zoology at Queen's. And they would post when am I going to hear? You know, I've got an 86% average. When am I going to hear? And the problem is they weren't going to hear until the beginning of the third round or late in the second round. And so, they got an early offer from Queens. They decided to take it. Because when the university wants you, you want them.

This year because of our enrolment shortfalls last year. This year, the university made a commitment to actually follow up most of the other universities do and look at 20-25% in the first round, and really filling up most of the class by the end of the second round. So that you're really only doing the last 10 or 15% in the third round. And in fact, we pushed more aggressively. So as a whole, the university was aiming for 40 to 50% of offers going out early.Because of that, we ended up getting more students. So we have models, or I should say the Registrar's Office has models that says if we send out 200 offers into the MBG program. We know that we'll get about 30 Students accepting out of those 200 offers.
And so, the number of offers will go out that match the model to end up with the number of acceptances that meets our meet our targets because every student will get multiple offers from different universities. And they'll choose which one they go to. So, we know that we have to send out more offers than the number of students that we actually want at the end of the day.

So, our models were based on our old timing, because the models have to be robust. So, they're built up over years, and they're continuously tweaked with every new year's data. And so, the change in timing made a huge difference in the number of acceptances we received for those offers beyond what the model predicted. And that's why we went 50% over it within CBS and our BSC degrees. I'll show you some data later, we're actually more sitting around 37% over, but it's still a lot larger. So, the timing of the offers mattered. And we saw that. And the other suggestion that's out there is that after two years of the pandemic were lots of things were remote and especially high school students who had one or two years being taught remotely. They are looking for programs that give them hands on educational experiences. And this is something we're really good at both for our Co-op programs that you'll see had really strong enrolments in them, as well as just all through our degree programs. Those labs, seminars, tutorials, the hands-on opportunities, the fieldwork courses, doing research in labs, the capstone courses and the honours thesis projects.

They all matter. And they're positive drivers for those students who don't want an educational experience in university that is remote or just sitting in a classroom, which feels like remote to some students when the classes are bigger. And so, it's our reputation and how much we engage students in their learning process that also drove more acceptances to us after the pandemic. Not that the pandemic's necessarily over but I mean after the last two years of high school and how that was managed in the school boards for them. So, when we look at the university wide enrolments, and this is all thanks to John Dawson for putting together the data, we see that the additional students that came through the university aren't evenly distributed across the different degree programs. In fact, we're sitting here with only a 35% increase, but it's 585 students. And the next worse college off is Lang with 438 extra students. You can have a high percentage, 34% versus our 35 in the Bachelor of Arts and Science degrees. But if it's a small program, 43 students it's a lot easier to accommodate then our numbers are. So as the provost has noted in some public statements, the biggest impact is actually falling on CBS and Lang for the additional enrolments. It's a lot easier to manage in all of the other colleges than it is in our two colleges.

When we take a look at more specifically within the BSc or CBS related enrolments, we also have to take a look at the other degrees that rely on some of our CBS courses. So, the Bachelor of One Health courses obviously the BSES, the Bachelor of Arts and Science. All of these feed into especially our first year courses, as well as some of our upper year courses. And our total impact actually is more like 600 students in the first year. But again, we're sitting on a wide variety that fall into CBS specific programs or BSc programs. So for the 567 and the BSc overage, we have to include the other two colleges that give out BSc degrees. We have about 450 additional students specifically in CBS programs and that's a really big number for us. It puts us at about 137% of what our target was supposed to be for this year. So that is, again, a huge increase. These numbers absolutely terrified me, no question about it. And what comes out of this is how do we manage it. And we'll see that in the second part.

But I do want to show you again, a breakdown now by program within the BSc. And it's also split up by colleges. So you know, CEPS has some going above and some going below. And these are percentages, so they're not actually related to the number of students. The nanotech Co-op is a very small program. So, a couple of students looks like a big percentage. But we generally see that almost all the CBS programs are above. Plant Science is nominally called our program, which is why it's in blue. But it's also heavily managed by OAC. So, it's not surprising that that's the one that's sitting with a negative change in enrolment for this year versus target. So, we are going to see across the board increases in our programs. But what's probably more important, especially if you're involved in teaching, the academic program staff, or faculty, or grad students is how they actually fall out and which programs are the most impacted. So, this is a breakdown that we get through enrolment and it includes all the Co-ops individually, as well as the three major programs Biomed Sci, Bio Sci, & Human Kinetics and everything else falls into all other Biology. And our biggest increases are coming in the general Bio Sci program, the Biomed Sci program, and Human Kinetics.

But that doesn't mean that these are the only places we're going to see pressure in the coming four years because you can take a look at things like Marine and Freshwater Co-op. It had a target of 25 students. And so, we needed 25 placements. It has a confirmed 56 students or 31 additional students over target that we need to find a way to accommodate by the time they get up to their Co-ops, and all of our Co-ops showed strong increases over targets as well. So, we see this happening again in the Molecular Biology and Genetics Co-op, Wildlife Bio Conservation. The new Co-op program had a target of 15 and is sitting at 30 with 15 overage. All other Bio sitting at around 131. The big increase there is about 38 students in Zoology and the rest are a couple of students here and there. It's about 20 students in Neuroscience and smaller numbers in the other programs. So, what I'm trying to point out here is that we'll see upper level capstone courses and Co-op opportunities that are going to be pressured by some of these increases in the smaller Co-op programs. But the major programs Biomed Sci and Biological Science as well as Human Kinetics, they rely on a lot of core courses in the first couple of years as well as overlapping courses in the 3000-4000 level. So, we're going to see very specific pressure later on. But every program is going to see the same, sorry, - every program will be providing the same pressure on our three main first year courses 1070, 1080, and 1090. So this leads us to how do we manage? How do we manage this extra cohort of almost 450 students in CBS programs, but 600 students when it comes to our first year courses.  And all kudos going to Brian for this. He developed a model that will take a look at all of our courses that are required for each of our majors, and looking at when they exceed 200, 400, 600 seat classrooms.

The costs per student in terms of the lab costs, the thresholds we have for adding extra sections for new GTAs, the staff support for those major lab courses. And we also looked at the program counsellors that are required for it. And by doing this with the extra cohort, you can see that it increases the number of sections we need in the 1000, 2000, 3000, & 4000 level. The 4000 level of electives, we have more space across them. So, it didn't really require extra sections because this we're really looking at required courses and majors with the idea that when it's electives with multiple choices, students will fill in the gaps for what's available. But even looking at the required courses. This is a significant hit in the first year 10 additional sections will need three extra staff and 38 additional TAs and we'll need an additional program counsellor. We see very similar numbers in year two for the 2000 level because we have that progression in our academic programs. And then the 3000 & 4000 level there's flexibility on when you take a 3000 level course.In some required courses third year, you can also take it in the fourth year. So here is where the models are looking out a little. They're telling us what we need, but we can't necessarily tie it to one specific year. We actually have to dig in deeper to see when will we need to put on these extra sections for the specific 3000 level courses that are going to be pressured by the students in those specific three highest degree programs.

But that fit into a request that I put into the Provost with the support of both ADs, support of Vanessa, Brian still supporting it, as well as the Chairs. We put together a request that listed all of these impacts the data. The data I've showed you here, other historical data on our growth in our undergrad programs over the last five years. And our faculty-student ratio, our staff-student ratio, everything to show that we are generally under resourced. We've been asked to take more students over the last five years without any additional resources. And there is absolutely no way we can manage this increase without resources. And we put together a plan for what do we need to be able to handle the extra cohort wave as it passes through a four year degree program?

And that's a key point, this is not we can do this continuing? No, no, this is what is the minimum we can do in a short timeframe to actually support these students in the first year. And support them through the second year and then give us time, we'll work out exactly what we need for years three and four and more detail to make that wave pass all the way through to graduation. And with that, we need two CLs to handle those additional sections, three teaching staff to support all those additional lab sections and seminar sections in the intro and second year courses. And around 30 plus additional TAs per year for the first two years, as well as one program counsellor to support the additional 600 BSc students. Because our program counsellors support all the BSc students, not just the CBS programs. We put this ask in, the other colleges were asked to put in their asks, and I gotta say, you know, we had ours approved fully but we got approved fully for year one. So, all of our requests and funding for year one is coming through, as well as for continuity, the CLs for two-year contracts and the program counsellor for a two-year contract. So, we can support them for the first two years. The Central Administration and Provost is not providing guaranteed funding yet for the second year. But that's okay. And this is thanks to the Provost for funding our first year and the continuity in the some of these longer term positions. It's okay to not fund the second year now, because this is based on a model. Let's actually see what happens as we try to support these students in this first year. See how things shuffle out so that we can better predict what resources will actually need in second year, and that may be much higher. You know, we might find that our expectations for teaching staff support or the number of CLs or the GTAs, or the program counsellors that were still swamped and we may need to put in a larger ask in year two.

So, it's better in some ways that we have the opportunity to go back and we're not tied in now, before a single one of these extra students sets foot on campus to a budget in the second year that was currently predicted to be slightly less than our budget in the first year because we need fewer GTAs and then also fewer lab supplies to go along with it. So, our plan for this next year, we're going to accommodate the additional students in 1070 1080 and 1090 by adding on some remote lectures. And this is all thanks to our instructors who have been very willing, especially in the fall term, to step up and help out - really, really step up for the college and step up for the students to support them in this. And we will have the staff coordinators to provide extra support, we will have the GTAs and the funding for the GTAs to supply those extra sections for the students. We're going to bring in the CLs in January because it takes longer to hire CLs. But this is going to help relieve the pressure on the full-time faculty who are stepping up to cover these courses here and also provide some continuity with the hope that some of the CLs will spend the summer prepping courses. They'll be teaching in the second year (2000 level or 1000 level courses) depending upon what works best for each program and each department in who's teaching what.

So, we have the support and the funding. So that we won't have to bear this burden alone. And that was what was important, and we can make it through in the fall in a very short timeframe.With this funding coming through as quickly as possible from Central, the ads for the teaching staff are generally up now. We know what we're doing with the courses. We're going have to start filling in the GTAs and the sections. I will say for some departments and across the college as a whole, we may not have enough TAs. And there have been talks with some other departments on campus who might be able to provide us with grad students in relevant disciplines to help with the GTA needs so that our own grad students don't have to teach multiple, multiple GTA contracts to meet the needs of our undergraduate program. And we're also starting to look at actually hiring new TAs, undergrad TAs, senior level undergraduate students who could help with sections or provide marker/grader support or other types of TA support for those first year or other courses, so that we can deploy our available TAs more effectively.

So, we'll find a way to make this work with a commitment to not trying to extend the time to completion and add an extra burden on graduate students. You shouldn't be looking around and saying, well, we need 38 more grad students and we don't have any more grad students. So how many grad students are going to take on additional sections? We're going to find a way to make this happen. Resourcing in the later years, year two funding as I said is going to be considered at a later date. But this is good because we can take what we learned during the course of this year and adjust our requests. The 3000 & 4000 level course needs, we need to map that out more clearly around years three and four. As well as seeing where students end up, we do see that the number of students for example, in the honours general Bio Sci will transfer into other degree programs over the first two years, because they decided something they take is more interesting to them. We can also see based on what courses that they take as they go through the second and third year of courses, to predict what courses they're most likely to take at the 4000 level in year four. So, this is a dynamic living process to understand the 3000 & 4000 level courses. And we'll keep continuing with that. We being the ADA office, the program committees, the faculty instructors, the staff instructors, the college will keep on tracking this and we will map out the best way to support the students. And how we need to resource it to make this happen for the students to come out with the degrees that they want. And roughly though, by the model we need as many resources for the final two years as we did in the first year alone. So, we need you know about 5 additional course instructors or sections, 3 staff, 31 additional GTAs, and of course, program counsellors for both years. So, these numbers may go up as I said, I wouldn't expect them to go down, I really kind of do expect them to go up as we see that they put pressure on specific courses. And we'll be putting in for those funds as well. Now, when I say we're going to be putting forward we're going to be asking for funds.

I do have confidence that as the provost has seen our needs and expectations. And we were funded without question or any queries coming back to us for revision with our first set of requests. That there is a strong commitment to ensure that we have the resources for our students to make it through the program. That we have what it takes so that we are not being driven absolutely crazy in mental health and wellness. That we aren't going to be burnt out from this after the burnout for everything we've had to do over the past couple of years with all of the pivoting back and forth over the pandemic. That it's really a holistic view of what resources are needed and will ensure that those resources are there. That's what Central is telling us. It's just that they're not committing to multiple years down the line until we actually see what happens the first time. And I think that's a fairly good tact to take. So, with that I am feeling confident that it isn't like all of a sudden this funding is going to dry up. I would expect us to get what we asked for in later years. But we need to refine what we asked for which in my mind will likely go up and not go down. The more info the more we see the students going through the system.

But the bigger question then is what does the future hold? So this is, how do we handle a wave? This extra cohort is a wave and I view it as a wave passing through four years of our program. This isn't a new height. We are not seeing a step function. So, a big question will be, will we see another big incoming class next year? I hope not. And I'm fairly confident the answer will be ‘No’ for two main things. One is this incoming extra cohort or wave that has gone through CBS and the university as a whole doesn't come with provincial funding. The province gives us a corridor, we are allowed to enroll X number of students per year. And that's across all years. Right. So, it's the number of bodies and classes in a given year. And if we go above that amount, the province doesn't give us their dollars per student that we're promised up to that limit. So, we always want to fill to the limit of what funding will get from the province. But as soon as we go over, roughly, we go from getting about $6000-7000 per student (full time student) from the province, and $6000-7,000 tuition from the students paid directly to us. If we lose the provincial funding, we lose half funding for every single student coming in. That is unsustainable going forward.

So, we have to ...the university has to bring the numbers back down to where it matches the provincial funding. Because we need the full funding level to really support this on a long term stable basis. The other reason why I don't think it's going to continue going forward is that the enrolment models are being updated with our earlier timelines, with the lessons learned in this last recruitment cycle. Saying okay, if we give out, you know, 50 offers for our new Wildlife Bio Conservation Co-op program. If we give out 50 offers in the first round, then we're actually likely to get 30 students right off the bat. If we give out those 50 offers in the second round, we'll only get about 12. If we give out those 50 offers, in the third round, we'll get 4. We need to update those models with the data we got from this past year. So that we actually come out at target. And so that's a key point I want to underline here. The university wasn't aiming to be 50% over. They were aiming to be around target up to about 10% over because students drop out. We get you know, we get churn over the summer where they accept the offer but they don't bother enrolling by September. And so, we wanted to be slightly over. So, when the students drop out, we're at target. We're at our corridor funding level. And what happened was it completely overshot. So, with the new models we should bring back to that target. This wasn't an actual long-term strategy.

And then the final point is, well, we can't support this long term without more resources. And so, when we look at a key factor, and we as a college again, I look at our faculty to student ratio. We have a similar value for staff to student ratio. We as a college have the worst ratio on campus 45:1. We have the worst staff ratio on campus. The other colleges have a lot less students per faculty member. For us to support 450 additional students in an incoming class every year. That's 1800 additional students in our total complement that we have to teach from years one to year four in any given year. So, at the end of four years, we'll have 1800 more students than our current 4000. The only way to make that happen is if we had so we're going well actually around 5000 now. We need about a third more of everything. So we'd need 30 more full time faculty members, nine more teaching staff, three more program counsellors, and at least 90 more graduate students to support GTAs. If this was meant to be the new normal going forward. There is no funds to make this happen. And there is no way that we as a college can support that.

So, the resources we asked for and that we got for this year is to maintain and support a wave that's passing through over four years and passes on. Any real increase in terms of a long-term plan needs to be planned in advance with resources to match it. That conversation is happening but in an incentive fashion. So, the university is looking at a new budget model, where right now we just get our given budget regardless of how many students we take in, in a given year. Going forward starting in 23-24, 24-25. It's going to change that if you take an extra students, you get extra money guaranteed in advance. So, you know that if you bring in extra students, you will get this many dollars in to support those students. And then we can strategically decide as a college, as departments, as programs, which ones we have that can support the growth, and can bring in more staff, faculty, graduate students to support those growing programs. And which ones are we are we a cap for that we don't want to advance, or that we don't have the capacity to grow at that point. Instead of the current method where we just get given our enrolments afterwards and our budget was already determined the year before. And we have to make it happen.

The funding we got this year is sort of a line in that direction. It is saying “Okay, we know we’re going to come down to something with permanent budget down the line for increased enrolments here’s a wave, let’s work out - give you extra money based on the size of that wave”. But again, this wasn’t planned. The argument is that Central wants the colleges, the departments and the programs to plan growth strategically and receive the funding to support that growth. So, for all of these reasons, we shouldn’t see the same thing happen next year. We shouldn’t see it happen the year after. In fact, I’ve been very clear, we have no capacity to accept an increase in our first-year class next year. Because it will take all of our resources including the additional ones we’re getting to support those students through the 2000 level courses. We just don’t have the lab spaces to actually, you know, have an extra 600 students in first year labs and an extra 600 students in second year labs at the same time. It’s just not going to happen.

So that’s a very clear message that I’ve sent up as an advocate for the college working with the ADAs office. Working with Dean’s Council. That we just cannot support this again next year. You have to go back to our normal numbers. But if we want to grow later, we can see that funding will come and there is an opportunity to actually expand the college in areas that we want to strategically grow in. No guarantees now, let’s survive the next couple of years and then when there is a new model in plan towards it. But it is something we should keep in mind when we go through our strategic planning process this coming year. For the new college strategic plan one of the things you might want to consider is an evaluation for example of what are the areas we want to grow in? So, there’s our average, with that we’re going to go to questions.